tapes, like photographs and videos, are [nothing more than] a desperate attempt to steal something from death's suitcase. - Mitch Albom

Take any emotion — love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions — if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them — you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

Remember me for these days, not the old ones.

By now, the morning sun was just over the horizon and it came at me like a sidearm pitch between the houses of my old neighborhood. I shielded my eyes. This being early October, there were already piles of leaves pushed against the curb — more leaves than I remembered from my autumns here — andless open space in the sky. I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.